The Twelve Dancing Princesses
"The Twelve Dancing Princesses" is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm and published in Grimm's Fairy Tales in 1815. It is of Aarne-Thompson type 306.
1920 illustration by Elenore Abbott
Performance of a play based on the tale in Maine in 1942
Grimms' Fairy Tales, originally known as the Children's and Household Tales, is a German collection of fairy tales by the Grimm brothers or "Brothers Grimm", Jacob and Wilhelm, first published on 20 December 1812. Vol. 1 of the first edition contained 86 stories, which were followed by 70 more tales, numbered consecutively, in the 1st edition, Vol. 2, in 1815. By the seventh edition in 1857, the corpus of tales had expanded to 200 tales and 10 "Children's Legends". It is listed by UNESCO in its Memory of the World Registry.
Title page of first volume of Grimms' Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1819) 2nd ed.
Monument to brothers Grimm in the market place in Hanau. (Hessen, Germany)
Frontispiece used for the first volume of the 1840 4th edition
Frontispiece used for the second volume of the 1840 4th edition. The portrait by Ludwig Emil Grimm bears resemblance to the storyteller Dorothea Viehmann.